1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data processing system, device, and method and a program storage medium, and more particularly, is suitably applied for the data processing system, device, and method, as well as the program storage medium for receiving and reproducing compression-coded music data, for example.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, voice compression coding techniques, such as MPEG1 Audio Layer3 (MP3), for encoding voice signals with high efficiency to compress the amount of data have been widely used. For a personal computer, for example, the use of these voice compression coding techniques enables storing music data as much as that equivalent to a dozen or so compact disks in a hard disk.
Also in recent years, there are portable digital audio apparatus for storing music data compressed with the voice compression coding techniques in storage means such as a semiconductor flash memory and for reproducing it from the storage means. Such portable digital audio apparatus do not require mechanical movable parts, so that they have advantages that their configurations can be downsized and that they are less susceptible to disturbances caused by vibration, compared to conventional portable audio apparatus like a Compact Disk (CD) player, for example.
However, the portable digital audio apparatus having such a configuration have a problem that limited storage capacity of the storage means does not allow to store a large amount of music data, thereby allowing only limited music numbers to be reproduced.